“Missing” sites in GUI

[Jason Russell]

We’ve been using a testing server and creating new sites using the hcisiteinit tool from the command line (We’re more of a command line shop). However, we’ve noticed that when doing it this way, sometimes the server.ini file doesn’t get updated properly with the new site name/path. Once we update the server.ini ($HCIROOT/server/server.ini) with the correct pathname everything works fine.

However, after rebooting the server, it seems to recompile that list via some method we haven’t fully found yet, and those sites are no longer in the server.ini file again, and we have to replace it for them to work correctly.

From the forums we’ve found a few posts that say that using the GUI init works correctly, but I don’t see any ‘strange’ options that would make a difference, but I can’t see what it’s doing on the back-end. Most of CL’s GUI items are simply command-line tools that get auto populated, so my question is the GUI init tool doing something different? This is going to be problematic if any of these changes get moved to our production systems and reboots make them disappear for whatever reason.

So I guess the two main questions are:

1 – On a reboot of the system, how does cloverleaf populate the server.ini? What does it look for?

2 – What does the GUI init tool do differently than hcisiteinit?

Topic

[Rob Abbott]

Hi Jason, what release are you on?   I remember a couple bugs in older releases:

 

1. the startup scripts would back up and restore server.ini , in some cases changes made before reboot would be lost
2. hcisiteinit command line did not update server.ini when a new site was created

 

I believe both of these have been resolved in 20.1.x.  I’m not sure exactly when they were introduced and fixed.

I’ll ask Goutham to comment further!

Rob Abbott
Cloverleaf Emeritus

[Gotham Mullaguru]

1 – On a reboot of the system, how does cloverleaf populate the server.ini? What does it look for?

It’s a known issue and fixed in CIS20.1.1.X.

If cloverleaf-autostart is enabled, on reboot, the auto-start script is overwriting the server.ini with a backup copy. 

[Jason Russell]

We are on 20.1.0.0, so I take it we are on the ‘buggy’ version.

Is there a way to ‘force’ the server to rebuild the server.ini as well as the backup? I know the new servers we are moving to are going to be the updated version. If no script, is it the server.ini.as.bak, or is it stored elsewhere?

I suppose that leads to the next question: When is the backup created?

[Gotham Mullaguru]

At startup (as.hci.start.pl) creates backup and &rollbackServerIni() (as.hci.stop.pl) reverting back to the backup file. This is fixed in the newer versions CIS20.1.1.x.

Comment &rollbackServerIni() from as.hci.stop.pl and that should fix the issue of overwriting the server.ini.

[Jason Russell]

Thank you, as we work through these, that helps tremendously.

Something else that seems to be tangentially related, when creating these sites, there are occasions where we create a group of sites linked to a master. We have a script that creates the site via hcisiteinit, then goes in and adds the master to the siteInfo afterwards, and verifies that the server.ini also contains the path. All looks good, except sometimes the sites will not see what is in their master. We’ve validated that everything is correct, shut down all the GUIs that we can, restart the site, remove and recreate, but the site will still not see the procs/tables/etc in the master site. Is there something else we need to be checking when we have these issues?

The only thing that fixes the issue is restarting the server, which is going to be problematic as we move forward with adding new interfaces into production environments.

[Author]

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